Insights Into Remote Site Conditions Without Leaving Your Desk

Gain Insights Into Remote Site Conditions Without Leaving Your Desk: Industry trends, tips, and practical uses for aerial imagery and geographic data from First Base Solutions, the experts who brought you MapWarehouse.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Ontario's largest geospatial data marketplace!

Let's take a breather and talk about data. What to do with it and why it's worth it to spring for the stuff that's really top drawer, item selection drawer, that is. If you've been following the series, you'll understand what that means, if not, no worries, check out the recent posts here.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Yellow is the new green.

CAA requests our feedback annually with their worst roads campaign. No Surprise here, the most accident prone road in Ontario is the 401. The worst section is between White's Road in Pickering and Courtice east of Oshawa according to the OPP. This road obviously has a much higher volume of traffic than other areas, this particular section is where the core and collector lanes split or merge, depending on which direction you're traveling.

Unique and impressive landscapes, both natural and cultural are often
the reason why popular tourism destinations developed in that place.
The best assets of these sites are most clearly seen from above.

Respond quickly and be certain about the ground conditions.

Armed with up to date information, you'll be able to avoid danger and direct resources where they're needed with confidence that you're making good decisions when there's a lot on the line and little time for planning. For emergency response, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid & disaster relief, aerial surveillance is the best way to stay on top of a quickly developing situation.

Monitor crop health and direct resources where they're really needed.

Get the big picture and use aerial imagery to support decisions you make throughout the growing season. Here's three ways modern agriculture is benefiting from high resolution imagery and other mapping technologies.

Mapping technology for urban planning & municipal governments.

With so many competing interests to consider, how can municipal planners design the best future for their city that respects the environment, addresses social needs and creates community engagement? First Base Solutions provides custom solutions integrating high resolution aerial imagery with interactive mapping tools for public and internal use.

How spatial data is being used in natural resources & environmental applications.

Canada is big. Our watersheds and forest corridors cover vast areas, often spanning several administrative regions. For this reason, it can be difficult to effectively monitor and communicate the conditions of the environment as it changes, and also difficult to reach consensus on a plan of action and coordinate on policies between jurisdictions. Lack of coordination between regional governing bodies, short sighted planning and rapid land development have been the peril of the natural environment over the last 100 years or more. Habitat loss, erosion, soil and groundwater depletion and contamination have all taken a toll, and now ambitious plans to mitigate further damage are needed to aid recovery, not just for the intrinsic value of nature, but also for the sustainability of food production, water, air and climate.

Solutions for engineering & property development

Get the best possible results from your development site with the help of aerial imagery, topographic models, and other spatial data. Use the insights you gain from our high resolution orthophoto to ease communication with stakeholders and support critical decisions.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Solutions for energy, utilities, service delivery, infrastructure and more.

It doesn't matter what you're delivering, if you have widespread networks and facilities to monitor and maintain, you need a fool proof system in place to stay on top of it all. First Base Solutions is a provider of off the shelf and custom mapping solutions to fit your business needs, technical ability and budget.

Tips to manage a spatial data library.

In private organizations, the CDO, or Chief Digital Officer, is a job that didn't exist just a few years ago and is still evolving. They help companies adopt technology, manage digital resources, and get the biggest bang for buck out of the online economy, among other things. Spatial data management in particular is so important to the success of organizations these days, in the European Union, the INSPIRE
directive was created to standardize the approach for the benefit of
public policy makers across the entire European community, with full
implementation expected by 2019.

Which image file format is best for my mapping project?

At the MapWarehouse checkout, you'll need to choose a format for the files you've added to your cart before your order can be delivered. JPG and MrSID are the most popular compressed image formats. Both formats can be read by most up-to-date CAD and GIS software. The best file format to use for your particular project depends on what you're planning to do with the imagery layer.

Opinions, facts, and data quality.

If you're a real estate agent, a lawyer, or perform any kind of on-location services for property management, you'll understand my frustration with maps that just look wrong. A common combination is orthophoto and parcel data. If they're both correct, why does it look like this in some areas when you put them together?

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

I nearly made a costly mistake once.

Starting with bad data, or just misinterpreting or misrepresenting data to your stakeholders can send your project down the wrong path and hurt your reputation. Your once compelling evidence that you've made good decisions is suddenly not as compelling as you thought. Just ask this guy, or this guy or this guy or this guy.

Hiding In Plain Sight.

Sometimes curiosity overwhelms and you just have to zoom in and check out an oddity in an aerial image. With the volume
of aerial imagery captured by First Base Solutions, naturally we
encounter this phenomenon in our own orthophoto.

Step 2
in any project is deciding what data resources you need to get started.

Geodata searches can be feast or famine. At times you might be
overwhelmed with choices, other times you might find yourself out of
luck. Before moving ahead with your project blindly, check out
MapWarehouse. There, you can review all the data types available
covering any area you choose, conveniently clipped to a common grid so
you pay for only the data and coverage you're interested in.

Governments Lie?

Even though scientists tell us that the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, the new Atlas of Canada tells a different story because the methodology of calculating sea ice has changed. Mark Monmonier's library of publications, the best known being How to Lie with Maps outlines this principle in detail. We don't condone dishonesty, of course, but you can emphasize the point you want to make, draw attention to certain features, or influence an audience like your stakeholders by presenting spatial data in a way that best supports your position.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Shopping is hard. How to decide?

So, you’ve seen your competition submitting proposal after proposal with stunning maps and images detailing the planned work. Even though your idea is better, you’re having trouble expressing clearly what you can do to the decision maker whose probably spending a minimal amount of time flipping through each proposal and needs to be impressed quickly.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

You're a specialist, not a jack-of-all-trades.

Luckily, you no longer need to be an expert in GIS to get what you need from mapping technology. First Base Solutions has developed VuMAP, a feature packed online mapping application with intuitive tools to help you view, query, measure, and report. We can also prepare any kind of custom mapping to support your legal work.

Step 1 in any project is researching the opportunity

along with its
challenges. Tight deadlines to submit a proposal need not stop you from
putting together accurate, well considered estimates for your time and
materials based on facts, not guesses, about the conditions at your site. MapWarehouse is the easy answer to finding reliable data
resources quickly and cost effectively. Use our imagery to see the big picture!

The business case for using paid data services over free resources.

Only the best data will do, however, Experian Data Quality's
recent “Create Your Ideal Data Quality Strategy” study indicates 92% of
companies surveyed are experiencing difficulty with data management,
50% acknowledge that inadequate data quality negatively impacts their
business. In the specific case of geospatial data, another dimension is
added to the complexity of data that can challenge the best of us.

What's in store?

From Governments to Google, for the last 15 years, First Base Solutions has been the primary source for geospatial data and aerial image acquisition in Ontario. You might not know our name, but you definitely know our data.

Your GIS is only as good as the data that goes into it.

GIS is everywhere these days, pun intended. You'll read about the advantages of using GIS to enhance your business, the value of location intelligence and visualizing your business data over a map to reveal new insights about your mobile workforce, inventory management, and customers.

Positioning mapping as a solution not a problem.

The GIS Department in any company used to be a small group of experts zealously guarding their data assets, ready with a quick hand slap and a "Don't Touch!" to anyone who might poke their nose into where the year's budget went. Not so any more, as mapping is being incorporated into all kinds of business applications that weren't available just a decade ago.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Ontario's largest geospatial data marketplace!

Data season is coming up; construction, agriculture, development,
natural resources... you name it, everyone needs new data for their
Summer projects and the time to start planning is now. MapWarehouse is
the easy answer to finding quality data resources quickly and cost
effectively.